


To Kill, All You Need Is Fast Fingers

by AugustCanaille



Category: Punch-Out!! (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 15:34:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15197861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AugustCanaille/pseuds/AugustCanaille





	To Kill, All You Need Is Fast Fingers

When Doc started training me he kept sayin’ I was doin’ everything wrong. “No, step back, kid. Duck! Duck! Feint, jab, get the star. Press Start.”

“I thought it was Select.”

“See,” he said, “ this is why you’ll never get past the Second Circuit.”

His advice was right on but most of the time I never listened. “Ah, what does this old fool know?” I says to myself. He was just some old black dude from Brooklyn and I’m from the Bronx. Born and bred in the Bronx, baby! Plus he always made me wear this light pink sweatsuit when we went jogging and it embarrassed the holy hell out of me. I did like the music he played though.

He took me on after he saw my first stab at a championship. I just went in there and punched punched punched, didn’t think, and made it all he way to King Hippo. Then I had to think. It was all over, he sent packing and I went home, alone, and stared at my broken walls in my broken apartment and cried on my broken stool. Then I got this bright idea: I’d cheat. So I took a controller and packed it into my glove and hit reset.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the sheer resilience and adamantine power of an NES controller, but it’s there—it’s virtually indestructible. Cockroaches and NES controllers, and there you have it. Your end of the world. Once, after getting so frustrated at Tokyo Honda, the first real champ I fought, I yanked my controller out and threw it against my door. Then my dresser. Then my TV, shattering it. (The TV, that is.) So I took the controller and my extreme amount of frustration and went to the airport. I bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii. After an eighteen-hour flight I caught a cab to Kilauea National Park, flipped off the tour guide and jumped over the fence. It took me all night to hike up the volcano but I finally got there, leaned over the lava-infused precipice—sweating, boiling, roiling—and hurled the controller in. It landed right in the center of a bubbling lava stream. “Ha! I roared. “Have fun in Mappy-Land!” After dodging a few police escorts and roaming bandits I got back to the airport and flew home, the stewardesses asking why I was so red. When I walked into my apartment there was the controller, smiling, saying, “Hiya, pal! Wanna play?”

So you see, I hope, how _hard_ as nails these little motherfuckers are.

But I didn’t pack it in right. I went into my first fight and set multiple world records. I’d packed the controller in my jab glove but put it too far on the side of my knuckles, instead of near the leather. The first jab I threw at Glass Joe connected and shattered every bone in my right hand, reverberating through my arm and shattering them all, like a monster truck that crushes ten cars in a row. Wrist—shattered. Forearm—shattered. Elbow, back arm, shoulder, socket—shattered, shattered, shattered. I stood there swinging a wet noodle at Glass Joe, missing every time. I would’ve used the other arm for a Power Punch but I had no stars. Glass Joe knocked me out in the first. Hence, I became a multiple world-record holder in one round:

 

The only person to lose while cheating

The only person to land one punch against Glass Joe

The only person to break every bone in his arm in one punch (or in one fight for that matter)

The only person to lose to Glass Joe in the 1st

The only person to lose to Glass Joe, period

 

This dubious title of “World’s Dumbest Fighter” had one shining distinction: people talked about me. And who should have been listening? Why, an old trainer, spavined and put out to pasture, long ago in the wastelands of Brownsville… _Doc Louis._

Doc came to me one night, we were at the Donnybrook Bar, the old Irish pub in Red Hook, he came to me and said, “I saw your fight against King Hippo. You had potential, kid, but you didn’t know when to quit.”

“Quit?” I yelled over the noise. “Fighters never quit!” The bartender at that point was pretty sure I was wasted and I was pretty sure I wasn’t—having to nurse thirty-seven broken bones and all—and tried to cut me off. “I’m not quitting anything!” I roared, and with my good arm broke a glass across his big Irish nose and then all was blackness.

When I awoke I didn’t know where I was. I assumed the drunk tank. Then I felt water splashing on my face, and a voice saying: “Yes—they do quit. You gotta know when to throw ‘em and when to hold ‘em.”

I believe I said a cutting remark about his Southern poetry and he slapped me.

“A fighter doesn’t fight”—he held up his hands—“with just punches, with just fists. He uses his mind, he uses his feet, he uses his fingers.”

“Ah, you old fool, no one cares about you! No one’s listening. Let me go!”

But he didn’t. He sobered me up and the next day threw my dehydrated body into the gym right below his apartment: Mario’s Gym.

“Ok, ok! I’ll train!” I said. “Just no more proverbs, please…” I didn’t like his spouting off all the time. Every time I went to the corner he was saying something crazy to me…crazy old coot.

But he knew his stuff. He was a good man and he did right by me and I hope I’ve done right by him. All I have to do is beat King Hippo in our rematch next week at the Forum and I’m on my way to the next championship: the title fight against Bald Bull.

 

 

Getting here wasn’t easy. I positively blushed when I faced Glass Joe again. The crowd pealed with laughter; cameras exploded, flashes were everywhere, but in the end the ref—who looked very familiar—held my hand up. _My hand._ Ya hear that, Ma? My hand!

After that was the German muscle machine, Von Kaiser. He was a tricky beast full of devilish moves and an even more devilish mustache. They called him “Storm of Steel” and he had quite the uppercut, but I got him in the stomach with some pretty nice body blows and racked up some stars. I knocked his mustache silly.

Tokyo Honda was next this time. He held a minor belt and I took it from him. Literally. On my way to the ring he was showboating for his hometown network, NHK, so I busted in and snatched it from his locker room, held it above my head like Dempsey, like LaMotta, like Braddock, like Cerdan.

“Cerdan never held a belt, stupid,” Doc said, snatching it from me.

“Oh,” I said. “Well…he _could_ have.”

“We take belts one way around here—through victory.”

“Through victory?”

“Through Victory!”

“Through Victory!” I roared and ran out there and absolutely pummeled Tokyo Honda plumb silly. I hit him so hard Japan ran the headline:

 

Hiroshima

Nagasaki

Little Mac

 

Honda didn’t like that. He said he was going home to train and to gain weight, and that he would see me again, perhaps in another circuit. I laughed and held up my belt and jumped. The stadium pitched to one side and I fell in the arms of a million fellow men, all suddenly my friend.

 

 

Doc was relentless from then on. He made me jog along the boardwalk everyday until I saw Lady Liberty. “But I can see it from almost anywhere, Doc.” “Shut up and run,” he told me. People laughed at my pink hoodie but I didn’t hear them because I had the belt on underneath, and, like I said before, the volume’s real loud when I jog.

He forbade me women and drinking. “Women?” I deplored. “How could you?” But he was a martinet. He blocked all girls from approaching me, even ugly ones. Once a girl in a green dress threw herself at me on my way to fight Don Flamenco and Doc uppercutted her into the ceiling. It was the only instance in which I saw him throw a punch. I threw some uppercuts at Flamenco. Left, right, left—over and over, just like that. It was my second fastest knockout, right behind Glass Joe’s pale punk ass. They seemed eerily familiar too, as I saw them fall to the canvas, but déjà vu is a part of boxing. Every time I get hit, I feel like I got hit like that before, and I’m sure we all do, since we’re all intrinsically connected by socks to the mouth: Flamenco got socked by me who got socked by King Hippo who got socked by Nick Bruiser who got socked by Rick Bruiser who got socked by Prince Narcissist who got socked—somehow—by Glass Joe who got socked by everybody. Boxing is one wild look of recognition at each other, then a look of fear, then a sock in the jaw. Thus the chain repeats.

And repeat it did, for my next battle was against a boxer with the sweet name of Great Tiger, who also had an echo of repetition to him, employing some mightily dastard tricks against me. They called him “The Bomber of Bombay,” “The Bengal Tiger,” “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” and a lot of other nonsense.

“Where’s he from?” I yelled to Doc from my corner, right before the first bell.

“Bombay, stupid.”

“Oh,” I said. I looked down at my gloves and then at the lights. “Well, where’s that?”

“India, dummy.”

He told me to watch out for his disappearing act. I didn’t know what that meant so I went out there and clobbered him silly. Then, I’ll be damned if the turban-wearing Singh star didn’t crouch, rock back and forth, and _disappear._ He vanished! I looked back to Doc to ask what the hell I should do, but before he could answer me the Tiger threw a left straight, then disappeared, then reappeared with another left straight to the face, over and over. Déjà vu. I got knocked down after the fourth punch but jumped right back up—I hadn’t fallen since my ignominious departure from Glass Joe’s lone victory—and darted right back in. I threw a few but he parried them all, and the bell rang.

“What happened, Doc?” He started patting my shoulder and telling me to breathe. “Enough with your useless tips, old man! Why is this madman disappearing?”

He stared off into space and said, “You didn’t watch out for his disappearing act. I told you to watch out for his disappearing act.”

“I understand that! How do I win?”

“Duck.”

And like that, he threw me out there, right back into the melee, where Tiger immediately disappeared again. Not so much as a “How do you do?”

1-2-3, he knocked me down again and I think I turned pink on the way down. I thought, Is this clown related to Dick Tiger? and very much wanted to ask but thought better of it. This time I sucked in my gut, dug in my heels and went right back out there. Everything he threw I dodged. I didn’t so much as throw a single punch. _“You have to know when to stop fightin’…”_

He popped down to do his little act again and this time, I went all out. I never pressed a button; only the D-pad. I ducked every time. After three rotations he got dizzy and confused and I walloped him in the stomach. His face grimaced; a star popped up behind his head and twinkled. I lit his ass up. I hit him with a power punch that his mother wept about, and she’s dead, buried in an unmarked grave in Bhopal. I knocked his turban to Timbuktu.

… _eight…nine…ten!_

It was over. All over. Now he can truly disappear and I went back to Mario’s to perfect my dodging and my timing, which is where I’m at right now, telling you this underdog story. Doc’s got me on the treadmill now, panting and breathing, talking about “swear and emotion” and the popularity of our next fighter. King Hippo is not actually a king, at least that anyone knows of, he’s just a fat slob in a crown that no one can knock down. Ah, the poetry of brutality. One lends it to the stars and never asks for anything in return. The Stars can keep my verses! I need to muster all I can to take the crown!

“You have to watch his mouth,” Doc says to me.

“At the weigh-in?” I say. “I can handle the smack talk, Doc. You know, I’ve got a mouth of my own, if you’d let me talk. Once, in seventh grade, my teacher—”

“Shut the hell up! I meant _in_ the damn fight.”

“That’s it?” I ask, jumping off the treadmill and over to the speedbag.

“Get your hands wrapped first.”

“Oh—yeah,” I say, handing them to a Puerto Rican fellow with gnarled hands himself, and, very nicely, he begins to wrap my hands. “Is that how you got your hands like that, old timer? From the speed bag?”

He says, “No, I got this from fighting Macho Camacho in a bareknuckle street brawl back in San Juan. He lost, but you can get lobster hands if you’re not careful. Here, relax your hand—no, more—that’s it…”

I relax my hand and ask whether Super Macho Man is related to Macho Camacho but Benny, the kindly Puerto Rican, tells me no, that I’m stupid because one is a white guy from Hollywood and the other is Mexican. Doc just shakes his head.

“What? That’s not a viable question?”

“You think everyone is related to everyone.”

“We are—we’re all fighters. Sugar Ray Robinson is related to Sugar Ray Seales who is related to Sugar Ray Leonard, but only on his mother’s side.”

“No, they’re not.”

“And all the kids too, and King Hippo is related to Butterbean and you’re related to the dad on _Family Matters_.”

“No I’m not!” he screams.

“Well, then you are him.”

Doc just wheels me over to the speedbag and makes me crunch the numbers: one, two, one two—basic rhythm—machine gun punch…over and over, and he tells me the fight tonight against King Hippo will be my first major one, on Pay-Per-View and everything, and if I win I’ll go to the Garden to face the champ.

“Who’s that?”

“Some chump from Constantinople.”

“Istanbul,” Benny corrects him.

I decide to not be called dummy again, so I refrain, this time, from asking where the hell that is.

“So I’m on the undercard? Who’s the main event?”

Doc tells me it’s the Russian, Soda Popinski, versus the Philadelphia nightmare, Mr. Sandman.

“Wow,” I exclaim, “on the same card as the heavyweights, the bruisers, the World Circuiters.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, boy,” Doc tells me and pushed me toward the heavy bag, “concentrate on thy task at hand!”

We train and train and I take tips on how to beat King Hippo. “Remember your failure!” he yells, and then we go watch old reels of the greats, of Johnny Owen and Richie Sandoval, of Kim Duk-koo and Benny “Kid” Paret…

“Wait, Doc—all these guys died in the ring.”

“Did they? Oops—wrong reel.” He fishes through some dusty reels and I think he is hesitating, prevaricating. I think he is trying to tell me something.

“You think King Hippo is going to kill me?” I scream. “Well, I’ll show you, I’ll show you all!” and I run outside into the Brooklyn rain and I shadowbox the night, because everyone knows the New York night is the deadliest fighter of them all.

 

 

It is Saturday night and I am ready. My hands are taped. My face is greased and my leather too. I have my shorts and my boots and my black tank top. My head is bloodied but remains unbowed. Thy hands are taped. What a wonderful feeling that is, to have weapons of destruction taped by a trusty old man with leathery hands, thin as tracing paper but rough as sand, turning my ten open fingers into drivable rockets, two missiles that pivot mid-air. The lights go on and I am ready.

“Remember, kid, this is about waiting for your chance,” Doc tells me. “This isn’t always about punching—it’s about knowing when to punch.”

“He isn’t king of shit.” I pound my gloves together and make way for the ring, I, sultan of smack, the one and only—Little Mac!

I am flat on my back, looking at the lights. I can’t hit King Hippo. All he does is _block._ When I get to my corner, Doc tells me to watch his mouth and I don’t listen because he’s always spouting some bullshit. I run back out there and get knocked down again.

“Doc, what am I doing wrong?”

“Listen—hit him when he opens his mouth. Got it?”

“Hit him when he opens his mouth…ok…got it.”

Round Three. I run out and wait—feint left, feint right. Hold my punches. Hippo barks and I smash him. I ruin the right side of his face, then go for more but he blocks it. There are patterns in life, and I begin to sense it…

The crowd chants for blood. They want my blood, my innocent teetotaling blood and I’m not having it. I throw another right into his open maw and this time I concentrate on his belly: machine-gun gut-punch time. Rat-a-tat-tat I drill away and bruise and deform his fat, soft body and I even hear Butterbean, back in Arkansas, drop a single solitary tear onto his secondhand couch. I punch over and over and over and Hippo begins to wobble, then wobble more, then I dethrone him. He falls backward like a toppled skyscraper and there’s nothing but _X_ ’s in his eyes and my name in lights.

 

 

“You keep fightin’ like that and you’ll be on your way to the Dream Fight, kid.”

“What’s that, Doc?”

We’re in Mario’s again and I’m sparring against some luckless partner named Gabby Jay. Doc tells me I am heading to the Garden next month for the title fight: Bald Bull…the man with the one-punch devastator…

“He moves like a rogue wave,” Doc tells me. “He looks slow, but is anything but. His special move requires felicitous timing—either you’ve got it or you’re dead.”

“What’s he do?”

“Boy, you ask a lot of questions, kid.”

“You’re training me!”

“That’s right, that’s right. I know…” He sits down and meekly looks out the window. “It’s just that…oh, never mind. He backs off to one corner, Bald Bull does, then waits. After staring you down, he crow-hops toward you and blasts an uppercut.”

“And?”

“And it knocks you out.”

“Out?”

“Out.”

“Can I dodge it?”

“Yes, but I don’t suggest it. He’ll reload and keep coming at you until he nails you. Your best bet is to hit him in the bread basket, when it counts.”

I look down and hold my tummy like a pregnant lady, and I wonder where that term comes from, bread basket.

Doc grabs me by the shoulders: “This is it, son. This is for the title fight, the belt, your launching pad to the World Circuit. Don’t flub this up. They sent me out to pasture a long time ago, with Ferdie Pacheco, with Cus D’Amato…but we ain’t going out like that, are we?”

I look into his smoldering eyes and say: “Fuck no we ain’t. This is the Bronx and this is Brooklyn, and whoever’s dumb enough to come here from Kisstanpul is going to get caught between our pincers.”

“Damn right, son,” Doc says, and he hugs me. He hugs me like his own white child. “Damn right.”

 

 

I am in front of Madison Square Garden and I see it. I see everything I’ve ever boxed for. I see the reason and the goal and the manifest destiny of my every punch, my every jab, slap, circle, pop, my every hook and dodge, duck and run—my A, my B, my Select and Start.

 

TONIGHT

MAJOR CIRCUIT TITLE FIGHT

THE CHAMPION, BALD BULL VS. THE CHALLENGER, LITTLE MAC

 

My name in lights. This is it! This is the big one! My entourage takes me in and down the runway, the people scream: I am the hometown hero. I am the Bronx, baby. I am Queens and I am Brooklyn. I am Manhattan and I am Staten Island. I am Long Island, Coney Island, I’m motherfuckin’ Harlem personified. And who is this puke? This foreigner that’s in my land? He is the enemy! He is the perpetrator! He has my belt and I aim to get it!

The bells sounds and I outdance this slug. He is powerful but slow. I dance and move, I float, I sting, I throw a couple of special sauces in his face—Van Cortland-style and he doesn’t like it.

He backs away.

Remember everything Doc taught you. Remember the credo: _Hit him when it counts!_

He knocks me pink, pink and sideways, and I meet the mat with my face. I guess when I hit him, it didn’t count. I can barely move… _five, six_ …My face feels like those craters on the moon, the ones with names because they’re so big… _seven, eight_ …“Get up, Mac!” … _nine_ … “Get up!”

I stagger to my feet and the bell rings. Doc pats me on the shoulder and I hit Select and he pats harder.

“Doc, I hit him…in the bread basket…just like you said.”

“Not the right time. You just have to feel him out.”

“Feel him out? We aren’t flushing groundhogs from their holes—I’m boxing a two-hundred pound insane man from Sunkistcanbul. When do I hit him in the breadbasket?”

Then, amid the lights and cameras, amid the voices of the night, Doc tells me something that I’ll never forget:

“It doesn’t matter how big he is—everyone’s a pussy somewhere. Got that? Everyone is a pussy for something or someone or some sport—even me. Even you. You have all you need to knock him out. You have all you need to take the top of his head off. Sometimes, kid, people forget that to kill, the only thing you need is fast fingers. That’s it. Now go out and kill.”

I rush into it like a storm chaser. Damn the rules, damn the art, damn the needs, damn the sweet science. This is the time for fast fingers, for fingers that kill.

Bald Bull moves quietly backward once again. I crouch and I wait. I wait with all the world. I wait with the patience of a Templar knight. I wait with the poise of Apollo, of Ajax, of Poseidon and Zeus. I wait like a man that is little.

He charges. I stand still. He comes closer and I do not move. I stand in the center of maelstroms and throw up my fist. I pilot burning planes to the ground, I sink ghost ships to the bottom of the universe. I wait till he’s right on top of me. I wait till I can smell his Turkish coffee and rugs and incense and then I start with all the defiance in my toes. It pushes through my sole and into my heel, which springboard actuates my entire leg—ankle, calf, knee, thigh, other leg—rotate with my hips, glow in my core and twist a fucking fist right into his face.

He crinkles.

His face crinkles into a stolen mask of shame, his left eye pops and explodes and his entire body goes limp, because I hit him when it counted, I hit him in the breadbasket. He crumples face first and _dies_. He dies right on the mat and no one cares because no one can see, they’re all looking at me, they’re all looking at me holding the belt and me jumping into the sky and me, the title holder, me with Doc, no longer out to pasture, Doc, the amazing grace, the prophet, and all they see is this:

Champion.

Champion.

_Champion._

As all of New York carries me on their shoulders, I yell over to Doc, who is still smiling: “Who’s next, Doc?”

“Tokyo Honda wants that rematch!”

And so it begins.


End file.
